


On the Nature of Building a Home

by TheSerpentsTooth



Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Aziraphale's Bookshop, Character Study, Crowleys Flat, I just love these boys, M/M, South Downs Cottage (Good Omens), and they hate their stupid home towns, im just amazed at the environmental details in this show, so that's what this is about, they're soft, this has been stuck in my head for a few days
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-20
Updated: 2019-06-20
Packaged: 2020-05-15 04:27:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,245
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19288117
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheSerpentsTooth/pseuds/TheSerpentsTooth
Summary: When an angel or a demon has been on Earth for millennia, they are able to tailor their individual worlds to their every passing whim. Their immediate environment can be meticulously crafted, down to every centimeter. Doing so would be seen as a flagrant act of free will, but if it is done slowly enough and with the right amount of care, it could almost seem like an accident.How Crowley and Aziraphale have chosen to set the places they've built for themselves apart from the places they were built for.





	On the Nature of Building a Home

**Author's Note:**

> hey guys! this is my first work i'm posting in a very long time, and my first one for good omens. i've caught the bug, and i do hope to write more. i really had to get this written and out there, because i just can not stop thinking about these boys and the choices they make against their supposed innate ways of being.

When an angel or a demon has been on Earth for millennia, they are able to tailor their individual worlds to their every passing whim. Their immediate environment can be meticulously crafted, down to every centimeter. Doing so would be seen as a flagrant act of free will, but if it is done slowly enough and with the right amount of care, it could almost seem like an accident.

And if that perfectly crafted environment happens to be completely antithetical to the worlds they were made actually for, that is also an accident. Unequivocally. 

Hell is crowded, dirty, and full of people who shamble aimlessly through narrow hallways, the scent of their decaying bodies and eternal regrets wafting behind them. It’s warm, but not enough to scald. Just enough to be itchy, uncomfortable, to make you wish you could reach for a thermostat. Just enough that bugs and bacteria breed in every pore. For Crowley, Hell never had enough room to truly draw a fulfilling breath, much less have a corner to oneself when one is in desperate need of such a thing. 

Other demons don’t have home bases on Earth, but if they did, they would likely be much the same. Rot and death piling up in the corners, stolen possessions thrown thoughtlessly onto chipped desks and unpolished floors, perhaps even other demons sharing the space and glowering from across the room. The air would be fetid and stale, the windows never opened. There would be a single lamp on in the center of the floor for light. All of this is because there is something to say about the comforts of home, and for demons, that home is Hell. 

Crowley’s flat looks nothing of the sort. He wouldn’t call it a home, it certainly doesn’t feel like one. With it’s shining floors and clean desk, it’s well maintained astronomy books and demon-powered refrigerator, it is always kept up. It never looks lived in, outside of the large dark wood bed that always has rumpled silken sheets when he first wakes up from a nap. The sheets are always pristine moments later. Demons are not neat freaks, and truthfully Crowley isn’t either. There is just something about it that soothes his nerves, seeing everything exactly in the place he deemed fit. He has complete control here. 

The original sketch of the Mona Lisa is hanging on the wall, easily seen from the large throne he used as a desk chair that is older than any human bopping around outside. His plants were grown from seeds, and they were the lushest in all of London. Every room is a carefully cataloged museum of his greatest prides and joys. 

These things are his, and his alone. 

This place is his, and his alone.

Homey or otherwise, it’s his. And when you’re a demon who was born and made in a group of thousands, fell and burned in a group of thousands, shoved past rotting crowds every day with even more thousands, when all you’ve ever wanted was something that is just yours? A pristine flat is plenty to be proud of. 

Heaven is empty. There are buildings and angels and light and orderly queues, but there is no real substance to the space. Heaven doesn’t smell like anything, not even the harsh antiseptic that such a sparkly clean space would have on Earth. It doesn’t really feel like anything either. Mild disappointment, occasionally. A vague sense of comfort and fulfillment, often, but with nothing concrete to tie those feelings to they can lead one more adrift than before as they try to place what it is that’s slightly lifting their spirits and come up with nothing. Angels don’t touch, not casually and not professionally. Heaven is the empty space between bodies. Heaven is large expanses of clean slates. 

An angel like Gabriel would walk into a new flat, see it’s distressingly blank interior that makes humans itch to fill the walls with color and the floors with soft comforts, and gladly stand right in the center of it with no adjustments at all. They could exist there happily, maybe bringing in a few trinkets that caught their eye or a simple wardrobe for their few items of clothing, but they would never drag a plush Persian rug up two flights of stairs just to see it laid out flat. 

Aziraphale has. It now lays on the floor of his office, but it is often covered in books or papers that he needed to shift around for some reason of another. His desk is filled with these sorts of stacks, and between the stacks are books tipped onto their bindings to save space and empty mugs in case he should need one at a moments notice. There are flowers on either side of the front entrance, a convenient excuse for the ever present smell of lavender and rose. 

Aziraphale doesn’t sleep, so his small bedroom is frankly boring, but the spaces he does frequent are overflowing with stuff and things and whatchamacallits. He delights in his things, in the act of holding on to sentiments and feeding simple pleasures. He knows exactly what brings him joy, and he clings to those things in a very physical way. 

As much as he hoards items, he’s hoarding the feelings they carry.

Heaven was never so big on sentiment. 

Heaven was also never so big on choices. Crowley made a wrong one, once. It had cost him everything. Now he keeps his home to himself, an oasis that no one can touch or criticize. There are no wrong choices if there is no one there to see them. 

Aziraphale’s home often has other’s milling about, as it is also technically a bookshop. He’s not always one for being alone, and as much as he really wishes they wouldn’t take his perfectly good things and exchange them for the currency of the day, he does appreciate the genial company. Kind smiles and casual touches over turned pages have always made the sun shine a bit brighter outside of Mr. Ezra Fell’s stores.

Empty space and crowded corridors. Opulent thrones and overstuffed armchairs. The clacking of a single pair of snakeskin boots and the soft padding of three or four customers on a busy day. 

It all seemed diametrically opposed, from the outside. They never agreed on aesthetics. Crowley would tease his angel about keeping fashions alive centuries after they should have been put down, and Aziraphale would turn and call the demon's insistence to keep to polished black for every object and surface 'a bit too on the nose, don't you think'. Then, inevitably, Crowley would bring up the mug with the angel wings or the oatmeal-and-cream color palette the bookshop kept, and Aziraphale would say something about greasers or how anyone without thick carpeting was a glutton for punishment, and around and around they would go, poking and prodding at the only other being who had ever really understood why they did what they did. 

One thing the two could agree on without question was that each place was better when they were both present, even with all of the griping about decor that this often entails. 

And when they venture out together for the first time to a little cottage in South Downs, how to make it feel like home is the last thing on their minds. When they walk through the door hand in hand, it already does.


End file.
